I’ve been thinking this could turn out to be Watergate 2.0 – a first-term scandal that bears fruit in the president’s second term. Or maybe not. Here’s an update from Quoting from Mark A. R. Kleiman:
David Ignatius speculates in the Washington Post that Patrick Fitzgerald’s pursuit of journalists’ testimony might indicate that he has shifted attention from the revelation of an undercover intelligence officer’s identity to the cover-up, and in particular to possible perjury before the Plame grand jury.
That could well be so. But I question the premise of Ignatius’s column: that the revelation itself is next-to-impossible to prosecute because the Intelligence Identities Protection Act has such a tough-to-prove set of elements. I continue to think that a prosecution under the Espionage Act would be a slam-dunk, given proof of the mention of “Valerie Plame” and “CIA operative” in the same breath to anyone without the very high security clearance required to know the identity of an intelligence officer acting under non-official cover.